last week when i gave a talk at the &NOW conference, i mentioned in passing that i think the modernists use source texts in a colonial fashion. i did not provide any evidence, nor did i expand on the point. i’m not about to answer that question now; i just have some questions about the statement. when, for example, eliot alludes to hesiod or chaucer, is that a colonizing through exclusion, i.e. here is what is in the tradition that is valuable and you are not it, or is it simply a defining of a cultural legacy? has that process in the west been separate from the colonial push for several hundred years? are the modernists like eliot and pound constructing a “culture” that they can then use to exclude others for not knowing? is that part of the reason they use the source text, i.e. to claim authority (even though the authority is just based on a past literary text)?
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